Quote:
Originally Posted by ai-danno
With all due respect to ocicat's response (and he knows I'm not just nipping at his heels) I think a 2600-series may be underpowered for your current 30 Mbps needs, and will definitely be underpowered for your 60 Mbps future. If my memory is not too fuzzy, they are approximately capable of 24K Packets per second maximum (and that's devoid of any ACL's whatsoever.) They are, IMHO, never great solutions beyond 4 bonded T1's and that's only 6 Mbps. They are the quintessential T1 router, but your bandwidth needs seem to dwarf that capability.
In finding a solution, I believe your bottleneck may be your $200 budget.
On E-bay you can normally find Cisco Catalyst 3550's for roughly $500... so I'd consider upping your budget on that front. If you get the EMI series (DO NOT GET THE SMI VERSION UNLESS IT'S STATED TO HAVE EMI SOFTWARE LOADED ON IT!) you will get full routing capabilities, 24 ports with 2 GBIC ports (on most Ebay'd versions anyway) and enough horsepower to get you near 80 to 85 Mbps of throughput.
I use 3550's extensively in my workplace, and they are truly the workhorse of the routing/switching world.
Of course, if you really wanted to walk on the wild side- If you ever saw a Riverstone RS3000 on Ebay for $650 or less I'd snatch it up in a hearbeat. Riverstone has a real soft-spot in my heart... and they will beat the crap out of a 3550 any day of the week.
That all being said, getting a server to act as your router (running OpenBSD) and plopping a simple or managed switch behind it would also accomplish your goals, and you would gain the admiration and respect of many on this forum (for whatever that is worth LOL!)
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Thanks for the info. In my research I found that the 2600 series just won't cut it for me.
It looks like the home-brew router is what I need to set up. I have a Netgear GS724 24-port managed copper gigabit switch with 2x 1gbps fiber ports that should do me fine. (Only port-based VLAN but I can mange.) Now I just need to find a candidate box for this!